Publishers and printers

In its role as the National Bibliographic Agency, the BNP administers the following services related to the work of publishers and printers:

Legal Deposit Service The purpose of the Legal Deposit is to collect all Portuguese publications in one place and provide for the disseminate of information about them. To this end the system envisages to form and preserve a national collection, produce and publicise an up-to-date national bibliography, and gather related statistical information. The Legal Deposit is currently regulated by Executive Laws nos. 74/82 of 3 March 1982 and 362/86 of 28 October 1986.

ISSN National CentreThe BNP serves as the National Centre for the attribution of the International Standard Serial Number or ISSN (ISO 3297 - ISSN), which is managed at the international level by the ISSN International Centre, from its Paris headquarters. The ISSN is a standardised unique identifier for serial publications – i.e. publications in any carrier that are progressively published in successive issues or volumes, usually having a numeric or chronological designation, over a period that is not determined a priori.

National ISMN AgencyThe BNP administers the International Standard Music Number or ISMN (ISO 10957- ISMN) in Portugal. The purpose of ISMN is to identify music publishers and their publications, and is coordinated by the International ISMN Agency, which is based in Berlin. It applies to every publication and edition of printed music, be it for sale, rent, or distribution free of charge, and irrespective of whether it is a score, a part, or an element in a multi-media kit.

Cataloguing in Publication Service - CiP Established in Portugal in 1990, CiP (Cataloguing in Publication) is a service that provides pre-publication cataloguing data – i.e. data that is prepared before publication and will appear in the published work itself. The idea is that when a work is published, it is already accompanied by standardised cataloguing and classification data that will be of use to both libraries and the general public.